The field widely agrees that race is a social construct, but gets into trouble when it ignores semantics.

IAN HOLMES

IAN HOLMES is an associate professor of bioengineering at UC Berkeley.

… Race is a concept defined by society, not by genes. It’s true that people around the world differ genetically due to their ancestry, and that people’s racial identity may be statistically correlated with their ancestry, albeit unreliably. But “race” does not mean “ancestry,” and it’s a loaded term for scientific outreach: Biological races are not a current scientific concept and often reinforce historical biases. …

In his op-ed, [David] Reich explicitly acknowledges that race is a social construct. At several places in the text, he goes to great pains to distance himself from racism, and to point out that traditional ideas of race are contradicted by genomic data (including his own work). For instance, he notes that the ways different people and societies think about race are inconsistent:

“In the United States, historically, a person is “black” if he has any sub-Saharan African ancestry; in Brazil, a person is not “black” if he is known to have any European ancestry. If “black” refers to different people in different contexts, how can there be any genetic basis to it?”

Uh … Have you ever thought how variable are the social rules for constructing who is in your extended family? Those really vary from place to place, time to time, and even from task to task. For example, in making up your Christmas card list, you might well include distant relatives you would not give a Christmas present to or invite to your daughter’s wedding.

But unlike a traditional Chinese extended family, that tends to ignore the mother’s side, or some African and New Guinea tribes that put more emphasis on the mother’s brother’s relations rather than the father’s side of the family, a traditional American WASP family would be relatively evenhanded in defining relatedness on both the paternal and maternal sides of the family. Traditional Americans tend to believe in equal value of both the father’s and the mother’s side of the family, and, in practice, tended to spend a little more time with the mother’s side on average, because women are generally more people persons than men are.

On the other hand, this WASP bilateral tendency breaks down when it comes to Presidential contenders from WASP brand name dynasties like the Bushes and Clintons. George P. Bush is sometimes considered potential Presidential Timber some day because he inherited the Bush name through the male line. His four cousins who did not inherit the Bush surname through their mother Dorothy Bush are just as closely related genetically to the two Bushes who were Presidents, but they don’t have the famous last name, so nobody ever thinks about them as Presidential prospects.

This family stuff is complicated and confusing. And yet, only the most deluded ideologues says “Extended family does not exist.”

Similarly, “species” are difficult to define and can be contentious to identify. For example, under the Endangered Species Act, tens of billions of dollars of real estate development hinged on whether the dark-feathered California gnatcatcher bird was an endangered species or merely a race of the common and mostly light-feathered Baja gnatcatcher.

Reich goes on to point out that how Americans racially categorize themselves correlates only weakly with genetics.

They always say this, but they almost never give examples, except to gesture vaguely at blacks.

One obvious criticism of the government racial categories is that the early 1980s revamp in which South Asians were moved out of the Caucasian category and into the Oriental category, which was renamed Asian, reduced genetic accuracy. But you definitely don’t want to question South Asians’ Minority Privilege if you have good career sense.

There are complex social reasons for this, including a historical legacy of race-purity laws based on pseudoscientific ideas (for example, the one-drop rule, which classified Americans as black if they had even a single black ancestor). And so, for example, some Americans now identify as black due to a single grandparent from sub-Saharan African ancestry, or an equivalent proportion of their DNA. A 2015 analysis of 23andMe data, co-authored by Reich, found that around one in 10 self-identified African Americans have less than 50 percent of their genome attributable to African ancestry, and around one in 50 have less than 2 percent.

Actually, that study found that the average black in America is 385 times blacker than the average white. That doesn’t seem very murky to me.

It’s quite bizarre that white academics love to imply that there are, somewhere in the U.S., vast numbers of people oppressed by miscategorization of their race, when, in reality, most self-identified blacks are enthusiastic about the current system and self-police the boundaries of racial blackness. Thus, for example, even though Rachel Dolezal had idiosyncratic reasons but understandable personal reasons (her parents adopted a number of black children and raised them as her siblings) for adopting a black identity, she was shamed and kicked out of black organizations.

Likewise, in Brazil, Barack Obama wouldn’t be classified as black. But in the United States, Obama went to great trouble to identify as black and it didn’t seem to hold his career back, did it?

The most obvious recent example of racial self-categorization causing genetic information to be overlooked was the President of the United States choosing to self-identify on the 2010 Census as black and only as black. But for some reason, academics almost never cite that example …

The reality is that the one-drop rule has socially constructed the traditional American gene pool away from a white-black continuum, as seen in Brazil, and toward a J-shaped curve in which the great majority of self-identified blacks have highly substantial sub-Saharan African ancestry and in which the vast majority of self-identified whites have barely any. If you think about who marries whom under the old rules for a few minutes, you’ll understand why this would almost have to be true.

The current genetic distribution shows the power of social construction to change genetic realities, but few social constructionist ideologues are very interested in that.

Moreover, the common academic’s implication that a Brazilian-style racial continuum would undermine American stereotypes is absurd: the Brazilian system just creates more stereotypes. Under the Brazilian system, Barack Obama’s presumed high LSAT score doesn’t undermine stereotypes about blacks performing poorly on tests, it supports the stereotype that mulattos tend to be more clever than blacks.

Holmes draws a sharp distinction between “populations,” which are good and scientific and are very, very different from “races,” which are bad and unscientific.

But his op-ed starts losing clarity when, thanks to some unfortunate language, the distinct concepts of “races” and “populations” seem to become admixed themselves. As an example, in discussing his lab’s use of self-reported race in tracking down genetic risk factors for prostate cancer, Reich places socially constructed terms (like “African-American”) right alongside the results of statistical inferences about genome history (such as “probably West African in origin”). He’s apparently trying to defend the use of both, but in the process somewhat blurs his earlier distinctions between race and ancestry.

If you stop and think about this for a minute, you’ll see that Holmes is using “race” to mean American medical patients who checked the “African-American” box under “race” on their forms versus a racially purer “population” of people of purer West African descent as, say, determinable by modern genome scans. With the recent sharp decline in the cost of genome scanning since Reich did this study, it would be possible to throw out of the study people who self-identify as black but who are actually less than a certain percentage black and thus are adding noise to the data.

But, even with a methodology that lets some noise creep into the genetic data, Reich’s study proved a success. Self-identifying as “African-American” is a risk factor for prostate cancer and doctors and African-Americans should be aware of that fact. It turned out that it’s good for patients, doctors, and medical researchers to think in terms of “black” / “African American” as a way to keep more men from dying of prostate cancer.

It turns out, in this instance and in so many others, that the government’s racial terms are good enough for government work.

In reality, the word “population” as used by “population geneticists” is just a euphemism so that they wouldn’t be called “race geneticists.”

A racial group is an extended family that is more coherent than a plain extended family due to some degree of inbreeding in its family tree.

For most racial groups, we lack complete genealogical documentation of their ancestries, so we use external evidence drawn from, say, physical anthropology, linguistics, history, religious studies, and the like. (In contrast, the looks, such as coat color, of a thoroughbred race horse doesn’t matter much because of the existence of Stud Books documenting the entire family tree of each new horse for up to a couple of dozen generations.)

In the 19th century, for example, it was not uncommon for anthropologists to classify black-skinned, wooly-haired inhabitants of Melanesia as far-flung members of the sub-Saharan African race. There wasn’t much evidence that sub-Saharan Africans had recently migrated all the way to the Pacific Islands, but they did look quite a bit alike.

Over time, however, the evidence piled up that the two races were not closely related genealogically (for one thing, they don’t look all that much alike if you spend time around both), and by the 20th Century, most anthropologists assumed they had just converged evolutionarily on a rough approximation of a look that works well in the tropics, or perhaps they originally looked like and just kept the same look for tens of thousands of years.

The ongoing advances in genetics gives us more in the way of genealogically information, and indeed it turns out that West Africans and Melanesians are less closely related in ancestry than the vast majority of racial groups.

“they don’t look all that much alike if you spend time around both”: true. I had a Nigerian friend; I had a friend from Papua New Guinea. In appearance each seemed reasonably representative of his race – or, if you prefer, his population. As you say, they didn’t really look much alike except that they were dark-skinned in a light-skinned world. Both were easy to like, I must say. No doubt a few years in the slums of Chicago would knock that out of them.

Somehow the conventional wisdom now has become that social categories are only valid if you can unambiguously assign every person to one and only one category. Same reason that the “woke” opinion now is that gender doesn’t exist / is socially constructed.

Is there a name, asterisk-like typographical marker, highlighting pattern, or some other sign we can agree on and apply, to denote all that writing which has, as its sole purpose, the minding of cultic language boundaries? This is more meaningless than the cliche example of bad theology, “angels on the head of a pin.” Future generations will spend more time with “Business Secrets of Atilla The Hun” than with this entire genre, and I want to signal to them that not everyone of our time was like this.

Tomatoes are culinarily categorised as vegetables, which shows that the distinction between fruits and vegetables has no relation to biology.

Or maybe the US social category ‘black’ and the racial concept could always be distinguished by even the most unlearned moron, even more easily than it is to know that while tomatoes are often categorised as vegetables, technically they are fruit.

I think tomatoes, which are plainly fruit, get classified as vegetables all the time because most people have never had a good one. The cooking tomatoes commonly available at a supermarket could certainly be considered vegetables in a 'culinary' sense, but that is because they are all clones of the worst tomato ever cultivated, with thick leathery skin, long shelf life (for a tomato), and a uniformly bad taste.

If anyone ever ate an heirloom cherry tomato they would have no confusion that it is a fruit, they are sweet and have a citrus taste.

I imagine if some giant agribusiness comes up with an apple with a skin made out of wood, a 2 month shelf life and a taste like boiled potato, not only would people buy it they would eventually forget apples are fruits and start calling it a culinary vegetable.

Quite fascinating to witness all these highly educated IYI, use intellectual sleight of hand to debunk ideas that are patently obvious. It is particularly fascinating to then see the same publications feature articles that use for leftist purposes concepts, such as race, that they have “proven” to not exist in other articles.

The Wolf of Wall Street, social media and shady financial companies inspire an affiliate-scam boom among young men such as “a stocky 21-year-old named Elijah Oyefeso from a south London housing estate.”

In Brazil, a person is not black if he is known to have any European ancestry

He got it wrong. In Brazil, usually you’re black if you look black, white if you look white, mixed if you look mixed, and Japanese if you look even partially East Asian. Of course looks correlate with ancestry, but not perfectly so, and in case of divergence looks win 90% of the time.

(to add a layer of confusion, most common people don’t understand race as ancestry; they think of it mostly as skin color, and are often very literal about it)

(to add another layer of confusion, a lot of the middle class – blacks/mixed specially – currently adopts American terms and definitions)

Indeed, I've seen other writers make this assertion that someone like Obama would be considered white here, since half his ancestry is white, but like you wrote, looks matter, and based on that I doubt the majority of the population here would consider Obama, or someone who looked like him, white.

Is there a name, asterisk-like typographical marker, highlighting pattern, or some other sign we can agree on and apply, to denote all that writing which has, as its sole purpose, the minding of cultic language boundaries? This is more meaningless than the cliche example of bad theology, "angels on the head of a pin." Future generations will spend more time with "Business Secrets of Atilla The Hun" than with this entire genre, and I want to signal to them that not everyone of our time was like this.

They should put their qualifiers and circumlocutions in the endnotes, preferably with a font-size that requires a magnifying glass.

"they don’t look all that much alike if you spend time around both": true. I had a Nigerian friend; I had a friend from Papua New Guinea. In appearance each seemed reasonably representative of his race - or, if you prefer, his population. As you say, they didn't really look much alike except that they were dark-skinned in a light-skinned world. Both were easy to like, I must say. No doubt a few years in the slums of Chicago would knock that out of them.

They’ll also point out that average differences between ancestral populations are typically very small compared to the variation within those populations, for most traits that scientists have tried to measure quantitatively.

Whenever you see an article about human genetics which includes terms like these: “social construct,” “social baggage,” “racism,” “slavery,” “eugenics,” and “Nazi Germany,” you know you’re dealing with an author who sees nothing inappropriate with intermingling politics and science. You can also be pretty sure which of the two will be his top priority.

Steve, this guy’s arguments hearken back to a point you made eons ago to the effect that race–or whatever one cares to call it–is not a hard-edged, either/or, categorical concept. It’s empirical and therefore fuzzy.

But Holmes insists that a race realist insists that if someone’s not this then they must be that. Problem is, no-one today really says that. So to support his straw-man argument, he dusts off Nazi and pre Civil War screeds.

Are these guys really so poor at reasoning? Or are they just saying what they’re paid to say?

We need a new term besides euphemism for this. A euphemism isn’t a term that is used to avoid political prosecution the way “population” is here. How about a “wardicism” , using a word to ward off a mob.

We need a new term besides euphemism for this. A euphemism isn't a term that is used to avoid political prosecution the way "population" is here. How about a "wardicism" , using a word to ward off a mob.

In Brazil, a person is not black if he is known to have any European ancestry

He got it wrong. In Brazil, usually you're black if you look black, white if you look white, mixed if you look mixed, and Japanese if you look even partially East Asian. Of course looks correlate with ancestry, but not perfectly so, and in case of divergence looks win 90% of the time.

(to add a layer of confusion, most common people don't understand race as ancestry; they think of it mostly as skin color, and are often very literal about it)

(to add another layer of confusion, a lot of the middle class - blacks/mixed specially - currently adopts American terms and definitions)

Indeed, I’ve seen other writers make this assertion that someone like Obama would be considered white here, since half his ancestry is white, but like you wrote, looks matter, and based on that I doubt the majority of the population here would consider Obama, or someone who looked like him, white.

This just makes me want to vomit on these men: every liberal professor, people like Reich, most Democrats, and evil, treasonous Never-Trumpers, are proving once, and for all, that checking off boxes for race, on college applications, is wrong/redundant. If race is a social construct, then finally, Affirmative Action, and, the ridiculous race boxes in any application these days, need to be terminated. The hypocrisy of these leftists & never-Trumpers is just so boring and disgusting. Such lying liars- yeeech! Haha, however, at some point when their fantasy of a multi-racial world happens, everyone will be the same and equally boring, and probably incompetent or just not motivated (can’t have some lingering white linage of people who are more privileged over the wonderful multiculti population), which will inevitably, include their own progeny!

Is there a name, asterisk-like typographical marker, highlighting pattern, or some other sign we can agree on and apply, to denote all that writing which has, as its sole purpose, the minding of cultic language boundaries? This is more meaningless than the cliche example of bad theology, "angels on the head of a pin." Future generations will spend more time with "Business Secrets of Atilla The Hun" than with this entire genre, and I want to signal to them that not everyone of our time was like this.

As physical national borders are deemed passe, every metaphysical inch of linguistic-ideological border is defended ever more relentlessly. By the same people.

White liberals and the Mulatto Elite, despairing of achievement from the true blacks, have long promoted the myth that the achievements of mulattoes and quadroons prove that “blacks” are really equal to whites:

“But you definitely don’t want to question South Asians’ Minority Privilege if you have good career sense.”

You don’t? That’s certainly good to know, it means we’ve arrived. But I’d say a much more obvious reason is that it’d be hard to convince people that South Asians aren’t People of Color but Latinos are!

In reality, the word “population” as used by “population geneticists” is just a euphemism so that they wouldn’t be called “race geneticists.”

That seems overly dismissive. In the statistical sense, a population is any group with a trait clustered around a certain value, usually in a normal distribution. Groups of humans tend to have correlated clustered traits distinguishing them from other groups. One of Reich’s findings was that genomic traits tend to correlate along with other traits. Those correlated traits would be the defining characteristics of “race” although there are clustered traits within and across races. Race genetics arise from population genetics but they are not one and the same.

The left has a terrible contradiction here that simply can never be resolved and can never go away. They are completely obsessed with race, which they simultaneously insist does not exist. Unfortunately they have been dealing with this for so long that they have become completely immune to any awareness of the most blatantly obvious self-contradictory behavior. When a large portion of the population has developed this immunity and reflexively acts in concert like Zombies, you have a really serious problem.

The most curious case where this might get used is California’s most prolific serial rapist/murderer the East Area Rapist (EAR)/Original Night Stalker/Golden State Killer who terrorized the Sacromento area in the late 70′s and then southern California in the early 80′s.

He’s never really been seen without his mask, although several sketches exist. From DNA he is believed to be of norther or eastern European descent.

The case has picked up a little steam lately with the FBI renewing its interest in it. I’ve read that at least some investigators are considering this forensic science reconstruction to get a possible depiction of the guy.

I’m rather surprised that I have not heard Mr. Sailer weigh in at any point. It is really one of the US’s most prolific criminal cases that has gone unsolved.

"she died in her sleep in April 2016, at 46. An autopsy found that she had an undiagnosed heart condition and had taken a mix of prescription drugs, including Adderall, the pain narcotic fentanyl and the anti-anxiety medication Xanax"

They’ll also point out that average differences between ancestral populations are typically very small compared to the variation within those populations, for most traits that scientists have tried to measure quantitatively.

Whenever you see an article about human genetics which includes terms like these: "social construct," "social baggage," "racism," "slavery," "eugenics," and "Nazi Germany," you know you're dealing with an author who sees nothing inappropriate with intermingling politics and science. You can also be pretty sure which of the two will be his top priority.

Average height differences between men and women are very small compared to the range of differences seen inside the sexes, so there are no height differences between men and women!

The most curious case where this might get used is California’s most prolific serial rapist/murderer the East Area Rapist (EAR)/Original Night Stalker/Golden State Killer who terrorized the Sacromento area in the late 70′s and then southern California in the early 80′s.

He’s never really been seen without his mask, although several sketches exist. From DNA he is believed to be of norther or eastern European descent.

The case has picked up a little steam lately with the FBI renewing its interest in it. I’ve read that at least some investigators are considering this forensic science reconstruction to get a possible depiction of the guy.

I’m rather surprised that I have not heard Mr. Sailer weigh in at any point. It is really one of the US’s most prolific criminal cases that has gone unsolved.

- https://www.unz.com/isteve/in-forensic-science-race-does-exist/#comment-2049861
Patton Oswalt: "Political Correctness Is a War on Noticing."

Charles Ng Chi-Tat (traditional Chinese: 吳志達; simplified Chinese: 吴志达; Jyutping: ng4 zi3 daat6; born December 24, 1960 in Hong Kong) is a serial killer who committed numerous crimes in the United States. He is believed to have raped, tortured and murdered between 11 and 25 victims with his accomplice Leonard Lake at Lake's cabin in Calaveras County, California, in the Sierra Nevada foothills, 60 miles from Sacramento.[3][...]Ng moved to the United States on a student visa in 1978, and studied biology at the College of Notre Dame in Belmont, California.[7] He dropped out after one semester.[8]:91 At that time, he met Leonard Lake. Soon after, he was involved in a hit and run accident, and to avoid prosecution he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Ng

Ramirez dropped out of Jefferson High School in the ninth grade.[22][23] At the age of 22 he moved to California, where he settled permanently.[24]

If you look at the Radford University/Florida Gulf Coast University Serial Killer Database, which tracks close to 4,800 serial killers and 13,000 victims over the course of more than a century, it’s clear the the 1970s-1990s were peak serial killer times. In 1969, when the Manson Family committed the Tate-LaBianca murders, the database estimates that 90 serial killers were active the in US. By 1977, the setting of the recent Netflix series Mindhunter, which depicts the rise of the Behavioral Analysis Unit at the FBI, that number rises to 201. When Silence of the Lambs, perhaps the loftiest entry in the serial killer canon, swept the Oscars in 1991, it was at 238. But by 2015, when Aquarius, a rather tedious NBC show staring David Duchovny as a detective tracking Manson premiered (before being canceled after two seasons) the confirmed number of active serial killers had fallen to just 45.

Two very vocal critics, Steve Sailer and John Lott, have been exerting a lot of energy lately trying to convince the world that the abortion reduces crime hypothesis is not correct. - http://freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who-should-you-believe/

The reality is that the one-drop rule has socially constructed the traditional American gene pool away from a white-black continuum, as seen in Brazil, and toward a J-shaped curve in which the great majority of self-identified blacks have highly substantial sub-Saharan African ancestry and in which the vast majority of self-identified whites have barely any. If you think about who marries whom under the old rules for a few minutes, you’ll understand why this would almost have to be true.

It can be a little amusing, with the proliferation of commercial DNA testing, to watch white Americans speculate on what exotic trace ancestry might lurk in the corners of their genomes. Not uncommonly, someone sends away his sample wondering if he might be 5% African or Native American or something (“They always said Grandma was part-Cherokee…“), and the only unanticipated results appear to be German or Scandinavian. “Congratulations! You’re even whiter than you thought.“

Articles like this are usually written by whites for other whites. People of other races know exactly who they are and are proud of it. If one were to propose that since race is only a social construct, we can abolish Affirmative Action, do you think that blacks would suddenly agree?

“But you definitely don’t want to question South Asians’ Minority Privilege if you have good career sense.”

You don’t? That’s certainly good to know, it means we’ve arrived. But I’d say a much more obvious reason is that it’d be hard to convince people that South Asians aren’t People of Color but Latinos are!

The most curious case where this might get used is California’s most prolific serial rapist/murderer the East Area Rapist (EAR)/Original Night Stalker/Golden State Killer who terrorized the Sacromento area in the late 70′s and then southern California in the early 80′s.

He’s never really been seen without his mask, although several sketches exist. From DNA he is believed to be of norther or eastern European descent.

The case has picked up a little steam lately with the FBI renewing its interest in it. I’ve read that at least some investigators are considering this forensic science reconstruction to get a possible depiction of the guy.

I’m rather surprised that I have not heard Mr. Sailer weigh in at any point. It is really one of the US’s most prolific criminal cases that has gone unsolved.

- https://www.unz.com/isteve/in-forensic-science-race-does-exist/#comment-2049861
Patton Oswalt: "Political Correctness Is a War on Noticing."

Goodnight, Michelle. You did good. You aimed a light and helped the hunters catch a monster. (Photo credit @vonswank) #MichelleMcNamara #IllBeGoneInTheDark #GoldenStateKiller

https://twitter.com/pattonoswalt/status/989343507314823168

“she died in her sleep in April 2016, at 46. An autopsy found that she had an undiagnosed heart condition and had taken a mix of prescription drugs, including Adderall, the pain narcotic fentanyl and the anti-anxiety medication Xanax”

If race is a social construct, why do societies differ with race?
Currently in the US, there are millions who identify as Afro-Americans, or Latinos. They consider themselves to be a different race from the rest of Americans. Their societies are, and have been, demonstrably more violent and prone to criminal activity, than the rest of American society. That is not to say all Afro-Americans and/or Latinos are violent nor does it say that the rest of American society is non violent.
What is acceptable and “normal” in Afro-American and Latino societies is markedly different from “White” societies. How can that be? Quite simple actually: society is a racial construct.

Steve, this guy's arguments hearken back to a point you made eons ago to the effect that race--or whatever one cares to call it--is not a hard-edged, either/or, categorical concept. It's empirical and therefore fuzzy.

But Holmes insists that a race realist insists that if someone's not this then they must be that. Problem is, no-one today really says that. So to support his straw-man argument, he dusts off Nazi and pre Civil War screeds.

Are these guys really so poor at reasoning? Or are they just saying what they're paid to say?

Are these guys really so poor at reasoning? Or are they just saying what they’re paid to say?

I think you’ve hit it. Just like the IPCC report on Global Warming. They, a college in the UK, were paid by the US government to find global warming, and miracle of miracles, they did.

Let’s face it. Governments need problems to solve. If not war, then global warming, or inequality, or AIDS medication, or cancer or other diseases that need cures. Or education.

All of it requiring more tax money to be funneled to campaign contributers and their friends, some known and some secret. Again, always follow the money, when possible.

Tomatoes are culinarily categorised as vegetables, which shows that the distinction between fruits and vegetables has no relation to biology.

Or maybe the US social category ‘black’ and the racial concept could always be distinguished by even the most unlearned moron, even more easily than it is to know that while tomatoes are often categorised as vegetables, technically they are fruit.

I think tomatoes, which are plainly fruit, get classified as vegetables all the time because most people have never had a good one. The cooking tomatoes commonly available at a supermarket could certainly be considered vegetables in a ‘culinary’ sense, but that is because they are all clones of the worst tomato ever cultivated, with thick leathery skin, long shelf life (for a tomato), and a uniformly bad taste.

If anyone ever ate an heirloom cherry tomato they would have no confusion that it is a fruit, they are sweet and have a citrus taste.

I imagine if some giant agribusiness comes up with an apple with a skin made out of wood, a 2 month shelf life and a taste like boiled potato, not only would people buy it they would eventually forget apples are fruits and start calling it a culinary vegetable.

The most curious case where this might get used is California’s most prolific serial rapist/murderer the East Area Rapist (EAR)/Original Night Stalker/Golden State Killer who terrorized the Sacromento area in the late 70′s and then southern California in the early 80′s.

He’s never really been seen without his mask, although several sketches exist. From DNA he is believed to be of norther or eastern European descent.

The case has picked up a little steam lately with the FBI renewing its interest in it. I’ve read that at least some investigators are considering this forensic science reconstruction to get a possible depiction of the guy.

I’m rather surprised that I have not heard Mr. Sailer weigh in at any point. It is really one of the US’s most prolific criminal cases that has gone unsolved.

- https://www.unz.com/isteve/in-forensic-science-race-does-exist/#comment-2049861
Patton Oswalt: "Political Correctness Is a War on Noticing."

Charles Ng Chi-Tat (traditional Chinese: 吳志達; simplified Chinese: 吴志达; Jyutping: ng4 zi3 daat6; born December 24, 1960 in Hong Kong) is a serial killer who committed numerous crimes in the United States. He is believed to have raped, tortured and murdered between 11 and 25 victims with his accomplice Leonard Lake at Lake’s cabin in Calaveras County, California, in the Sierra Nevada foothills, 60 miles from Sacramento.[3]
[...]
Ng moved to the United States on a student visa in 1978, and studied biology at the College of Notre Dame in Belmont, California.[7] He dropped out after one semester.[8]:91 At that time, he met Leonard Lake. Soon after, he was involved in a hit and run accident, and to avoid prosecution he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps.

If you look at the Radford University/Florida Gulf Coast University Serial Killer Database, which tracks close to 4,800 serial killers and 13,000 victims over the course of more than a century, it’s clear the the 1970s-1990s were peak serial killer times. In 1969, when the Manson Family committed the Tate-LaBianca murders, the database estimates that 90 serial killers were active the in US. By 1977, the setting of the recent Netflix series Mindhunter, which depicts the rise of the Behavioral Analysis Unit at the FBI, that number rises to 201. When Silence of the Lambs, perhaps the loftiest entry in the serial killer canon, swept the Oscars in 1991, it was at 238. But by 2015, when Aquarius, a rather tedious NBC show staring David Duchovny as a detective tracking Manson premiered (before being canceled after two seasons) the confirmed number of active serial killers had fallen to just 45.

I observed somewhere that California has a unique arrangement of urban density and wilderness that makes it ideal for creepers. Lots of people moving in and out, lots of places to hide, maximum variety of environment in one state. Apparently they got the GSK using DNA from an ancestry service, a good reminder that you pay them to take and copyright what is yours, and possibly use it in the future to put you in prison.
I am loving the Ng story.>have name made of phonetic monosyllables
>police photographer still misspells it
>be wanted by the US Military
>for stealing full-auto weapons
>and promptly escaping a stockade to the Los Angeles underground
>be wanted by the State of California for kidnapping people and torturing them to death
>but, y'see, not all cans of salmon are the same
>this is the red stuff, not the cheap pink stuff, caught by a family business with a whimsically vintage logo, in small, dolphin-safe batches
>u n s a l t e d
>yeah, we're talking about a can of salmon, but it's a choice can of salmon, it's not like it was generic tuna here

It’s quite bizarre that white academics love to imply that there are, somewhere in the U.S., vast numbers of people oppressed by miscategorization of their race, when, in reality, most self-identified blacks are enthusiastic about the current system and self-police the boundaries of racial blackness.

White liberals think that just because they pretend that racial boundaries don’t exist that it will lead to a koombaya world where all people will join as one. In reality it comes from a deep down feeling on their part that all people just want to be white liberals and can’t because bad whites won’t let them. They are in for a let down when whites are a minority and the inter-white strife between conservative and liberal becomes irrelevant.

Population geneticists work with local populations. Most Americans fail to understand or grasp this because their identity politics is based on pan-Europeanism (i.e. “European/White Americans”) or pan-Africanism (i.e. “African/Black Americans”), rather than a more localised ethnicity like Manx, or Dutch.

The large continental “races” like “European”/”white” or “African/Black” have no utility and are not what population geneticists work with, hence races don’t exist, but local breeding populations (also known as demes) do. As summarised by the biological anthropologist Jonathan Relethford (2017):

“Application of much of population genetics works best when considering variation between local populations and not between aggregates. The fine detail of our species’ evolutionary history and its impact on patterns of genetic variation are lost when trying to categorize and classify into races.”

Most Americans fail to accept this because they cannot identify with a local ethnicity like Manx or Dutch, but only a broad pan-European “White”, but that’s not really my problem (outside of US people identify with their local ethnicity, not “White” or “Black”). Anyway, try putting science before politics for once.

Does David Reich qualify as a population geneticist for you? He writes in his new book:

"Today, the peoples of West Eurasia—the vast region spanning Europe, the Near East, and much of central Asia—are genetically highly similar. The physical similarity of West Eurasian populations was recognized in the eighteenth century by scholars who classified the people of West Eurasia as “Caucasoids” to differentiate them from East Asian “Mongoloids,” sub-Saharan African “Negroids,” and “Australoids” of Australia and New Guinea…. [P]opulations within West Eurasia are typically around seven times more similar to one another than West Eurasians are to East Asians. When frequencies of mutations are plotted on a map, West Eurasia appears homogeneous, from the Atlantic façade of Europe to the steppes of central Asia. There is a sharp gradient of change in central Asia before another region of homogeneity is reached in East Asia…."

Population geneticists work with local populations. Most Americans fail to understand or grasp this because their identity politics is based on pan-Europeanism (i.e. "European/White Americans") or pan-Africanism (i.e. "African/Black Americans"), rather than a more localised ethnicity like Manx, or Dutch.

The large continental "races" like "European"/"white" or "African/Black" have no utility and are not what population geneticists work with, hence races don't exist, but local breeding populations (also known as demes) do. As summarised by the biological anthropologist Jonathan Relethford (2017):

"Application of much of population genetics works best when considering variation between local populations and not between aggregates. The fine detail of our species' evolutionary history and its impact on patterns of genetic variation are lost when trying to categorize and classify into races."

Most Americans fail to accept this because they cannot identify with a local ethnicity like Manx or Dutch, but only a broad pan-European "White", but that's not really my problem (outside of US people identify with their local ethnicity, not "White" or "Black"). Anyway, try putting science before politics for once.

Does David Reich qualify as a population geneticist for you? He writes in his new book:

“Today, the peoples of West Eurasia—the vast region spanning Europe, the Near East, and much of central Asia—are genetically highly similar. The physical similarity of West Eurasian populations was recognized in the eighteenth century by scholars who classified the people of West Eurasia as “Caucasoids” to differentiate them from East Asian “Mongoloids,” sub-Saharan African “Negroids,” and “Australoids” of Australia and New Guinea…. [P]opulations within West Eurasia are typically around seven times more similar to one another than West Eurasians are to East Asians. When frequencies of mutations are plotted on a map, West Eurasia appears homogeneous, from the Atlantic façade of Europe to the steppes of central Asia. There is a sharp gradient of change in central Asia before another region of homogeneity is reached in East Asia….”

"The majority of human population geneticists and biological anthropologists, though they reject the race concept because of the arbitrariness of racial divisions, are prepared to divide the entire human species into more-or-less discrete panmictic units or demes despite the extensive continuities in breeding patterns and allelic distributions that exist. Biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks, for example, rejects the “typological” division of humans into a small number of discrete races because, circling the globe, one finds that traits are distributing continuously. He argues instead that it is the “small biopackages” called populations, not races, that are the “real units of human diversity” (1995: 274, 116). Similarly, human population geneticist L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza treats panmictic populations as real but characterizes attempts to classify “clusters” of populations into races as a “futile exercise” (Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazza 1994, 19)." (Gannett, 2003)

As Bill Nye recently said: "There's different tribes but not different races". The tribes are local populations, and there are thousands of them, too many to count... Notice how the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) contains 50+ population samples from across the globe; none of these populations are races in the sense of broad geographical aggregations (clusters) of populations, but local populations (i.e. ethnic groups) like Druze, Orcadians, Sardinians etc. Those are what population geneticists work with. Clustering Druze, Orcadians with Sardinians makes zero sense and Reich is mistaken. You can look up autosomal genetic distances (measured by Fst) between those populations and see they aren't particularly close; the only close genetic distances (under 0.1%) would be geographical neighbours, not populations living thousands of miles apart.

In Nei & Roychoudhury (1993), Cavilla-Sforza, et al. (1994) and Tian et al. (2009): the smallest genetic distance (under 0.1%) is between Germans and Danes (0.0009 Fst) whose geographical boundaries, are very close; however, if you then look at the extremities of Europe (southern versus northern), populations are more than 10 times genetically distant e.g. Greeks/Russians 1.1% (0.0108 Fst) and then if you compare a population from northern Europe to a population in middle-east, you find the genetic distance at over 2%. Genetic similarity is inversely correlated with geographic distance so populations are more genetically similar to others that are found nearby than distant. At no point are there sharp gradients in the genetic continua across space; what Reich is describing was refuted by Serre & Paabo (2004):

"Genetic variation in humans is sometimes described as being discontinuous among continents or among groups of individuals, and by some this has been interpreted as genetic support for 'races'… Our results show that when individuals are sampled homogeneously from around the globe, the pattern seen is one of gradients of allele frequencies that extend over the entire world, rather than discrete clusters. Therefore, there is no reason to assume that major genetic discontinuities exist between different continents or 'races'."

Charles Ng Chi-Tat (traditional Chinese: 吳志達; simplified Chinese: 吴志达; Jyutping: ng4 zi3 daat6; born December 24, 1960 in Hong Kong) is a serial killer who committed numerous crimes in the United States. He is believed to have raped, tortured and murdered between 11 and 25 victims with his accomplice Leonard Lake at Lake's cabin in Calaveras County, California, in the Sierra Nevada foothills, 60 miles from Sacramento.[3][...]Ng moved to the United States on a student visa in 1978, and studied biology at the College of Notre Dame in Belmont, California.[7] He dropped out after one semester.[8]:91 At that time, he met Leonard Lake. Soon after, he was involved in a hit and run accident, and to avoid prosecution he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Ng

Ramirez dropped out of Jefferson High School in the ninth grade.[22][23] At the age of 22 he moved to California, where he settled permanently.[24]

If you look at the Radford University/Florida Gulf Coast University Serial Killer Database, which tracks close to 4,800 serial killers and 13,000 victims over the course of more than a century, it’s clear the the 1970s-1990s were peak serial killer times. In 1969, when the Manson Family committed the Tate-LaBianca murders, the database estimates that 90 serial killers were active the in US. By 1977, the setting of the recent Netflix series Mindhunter, which depicts the rise of the Behavioral Analysis Unit at the FBI, that number rises to 201. When Silence of the Lambs, perhaps the loftiest entry in the serial killer canon, swept the Oscars in 1991, it was at 238. But by 2015, when Aquarius, a rather tedious NBC show staring David Duchovny as a detective tracking Manson premiered (before being canceled after two seasons) the confirmed number of active serial killers had fallen to just 45.

Two very vocal critics, Steve Sailer and John Lott, have been exerting a lot of energy lately trying to convince the world that the abortion reduces crime hypothesis is not correct. - http://freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who-should-you-believe/

The Beach Boys- California Girls (1965)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oRb9-mypxg

I observed somewhere that California has a unique arrangement of urban density and wilderness that makes it ideal for creepers. Lots of people moving in and out, lots of places to hide, maximum variety of environment in one state. Apparently they got the GSK using DNA from an ancestry service, a good reminder that you pay them to take and copyright what is yours, and possibly use it in the future to put you in prison.I am loving the Ng story.
>have name made of phonetic monosyllables
>police photographer still misspells it
>be wanted by the US Military
>for stealing full-auto weapons
>and promptly escaping a stockade to the Los Angeles underground
>be wanted by the State of California for kidnapping people and torturing them to death
>but, y’see, not all cans of salmon are the same
>this is the red stuff, not the cheap pink stuff, caught by a family business with a whimsically vintage logo, in small, dolphin-safe batches
>u n s a l t e d
>yeah, we’re talking about a can of salmon, but it’s a choice can of salmon, it’s not like it was generic tuna here

Investigators used DNA from crime scenes that had been stored all these years and plugged the genetic profile of the suspected assailant into an online genealogy database. They found distant relatives of Mr. DeAngelo’s and, despite his years of eluding the authorities, traced their DNA to to his front door.

“We found a person that was the right age and lived in this area — and that was Mr. DeAngelo,” said Steve Grippi, the assistant chief in the Sacramento district attorney’s office.

Investigators then obtained what Anne Marie Schubert, the Sacramento district attorney, called “abandoned” DNA samples from Mr. DeAngelo. “You leave your DNA in a place that is a public domain,” she said.

- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/26/us/golden-state-killer.html

I observed somewhere that California has a unique arrangement of urban density and wilderness that makes it ideal for creepers. Lots of people moving in and out, lots of places to hide, maximum variety of environment in one state.

It must be that the U.S. media has (un- or intentionally) mythologized and/or glamorized serial killers (i.e., Charles Manson, Hannibal Lecter, Dexter, etc.), because I see no other explanation and connection as to why the U.S. has more serial killers than the rest of the world combined, it looks like it to me. Plus the transient nature/culture of the U.S.:

The U.S. had 20x more serial killers than the next most country, England.

Does David Reich qualify as a population geneticist for you? He writes in his new book:

"Today, the peoples of West Eurasia—the vast region spanning Europe, the Near East, and much of central Asia—are genetically highly similar. The physical similarity of West Eurasian populations was recognized in the eighteenth century by scholars who classified the people of West Eurasia as “Caucasoids” to differentiate them from East Asian “Mongoloids,” sub-Saharan African “Negroids,” and “Australoids” of Australia and New Guinea…. [P]opulations within West Eurasia are typically around seven times more similar to one another than West Eurasians are to East Asians. When frequencies of mutations are plotted on a map, West Eurasia appears homogeneous, from the Atlantic façade of Europe to the steppes of central Asia. There is a sharp gradient of change in central Asia before another region of homogeneity is reached in East Asia…."

“The majority of human population geneticists and biological anthropologists, though they reject the race concept because of the arbitrariness of racial divisions, are prepared to divide the entire human species into more-or-less discrete panmictic units or demes despite the extensive continuities in breeding patterns and allelic distributions that exist. Biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks, for example, rejects the “typological” division of humans into a small number of discrete races because, circling the globe, one finds that traits are distributing continuously. He argues instead that it is the “small biopackages” called populations, not races, that are the “real units of human diversity” (1995: 274, 116). Similarly, human population geneticist L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza treats panmictic populations as real but characterizes attempts to classify “clusters” of populations into races as a “futile exercise” (Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazza 1994, 19).” (Gannett, 2003)

As Bill Nye recently said: “There’s different tribes but not different races”. The tribes are local populations, and there are thousands of them, too many to count… Notice how the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) contains 50+ population samples from across the globe; none of these populations are races in the sense of broad geographical aggregations (clusters) of populations, but local populations (i.e. ethnic groups) like Druze, Orcadians, Sardinians etc. Those are what population geneticists work with. Clustering Druze, Orcadians with Sardinians makes zero sense and Reich is mistaken. You can look up autosomal genetic distances (measured by Fst) between those populations and see they aren’t particularly close; the only close genetic distances (under 0.1%) would be geographical neighbours, not populations living thousands of miles apart.

In Nei & Roychoudhury (1993), Cavilla-Sforza, et al. (1994) and Tian et al. (2009): the smallest genetic distance (under 0.1%) is between Germans and Danes (0.0009 Fst) whose geographical boundaries, are very close; however, if you then look at the extremities of Europe (southern versus northern), populations are more than 10 times genetically distant e.g. Greeks/Russians 1.1% (0.0108 Fst) and then if you compare a population from northern Europe to a population in middle-east, you find the genetic distance at over 2%. Genetic similarity is inversely correlated with geographic distance so populations are more genetically similar to others that are found nearby than distant. At no point are there sharp gradients in the genetic continua across space; what Reich is describing was refuted by Serre & Paabo (2004):

“Genetic variation in humans is sometimes described as being discontinuous among continents or among groups of individuals, and by some this has been interpreted as genetic support for ‘races’… Our results show that when individuals are sampled homogeneously from around the globe, the pattern seen is one of gradients of allele frequencies that extend over the entire world, rather than discrete clusters. Therefore, there is no reason to assume that major genetic discontinuities exist between different continents or ‘races’.”

Our results show that when individuals are sampled homogeneously from around the globe, the pattern seen is one of gradients of allele frequencies that extend over the entire world, rather than discrete clusters. Therefore, there is no reason to assume that major genetic discontinuities exist between different continents or ‘races’.”

In case the visual is not compelling enough, be sure to note the relative % variance explained by PC1 and PC2 in panel B.

http://www.unz.com/gnxp/which-population-is-most-genetically-distant-from-africans/ has nicely formatted comments.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/08/which-population-is-most-genetically-distant-from-africans has the graphic.

"The majority of human population geneticists and biological anthropologists, though they reject the race concept because of the arbitrariness of racial divisions, are prepared to divide the entire human species into more-or-less discrete panmictic units or demes despite the extensive continuities in breeding patterns and allelic distributions that exist. Biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks, for example, rejects the “typological” division of humans into a small number of discrete races because, circling the globe, one finds that traits are distributing continuously. He argues instead that it is the “small biopackages” called populations, not races, that are the “real units of human diversity” (1995: 274, 116). Similarly, human population geneticist L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza treats panmictic populations as real but characterizes attempts to classify “clusters” of populations into races as a “futile exercise” (Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazza 1994, 19)." (Gannett, 2003)

As Bill Nye recently said: "There's different tribes but not different races". The tribes are local populations, and there are thousands of them, too many to count... Notice how the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) contains 50+ population samples from across the globe; none of these populations are races in the sense of broad geographical aggregations (clusters) of populations, but local populations (i.e. ethnic groups) like Druze, Orcadians, Sardinians etc. Those are what population geneticists work with. Clustering Druze, Orcadians with Sardinians makes zero sense and Reich is mistaken. You can look up autosomal genetic distances (measured by Fst) between those populations and see they aren't particularly close; the only close genetic distances (under 0.1%) would be geographical neighbours, not populations living thousands of miles apart.

In Nei & Roychoudhury (1993), Cavilla-Sforza, et al. (1994) and Tian et al. (2009): the smallest genetic distance (under 0.1%) is between Germans and Danes (0.0009 Fst) whose geographical boundaries, are very close; however, if you then look at the extremities of Europe (southern versus northern), populations are more than 10 times genetically distant e.g. Greeks/Russians 1.1% (0.0108 Fst) and then if you compare a population from northern Europe to a population in middle-east, you find the genetic distance at over 2%. Genetic similarity is inversely correlated with geographic distance so populations are more genetically similar to others that are found nearby than distant. At no point are there sharp gradients in the genetic continua across space; what Reich is describing was refuted by Serre & Paabo (2004):

"Genetic variation in humans is sometimes described as being discontinuous among continents or among groups of individuals, and by some this has been interpreted as genetic support for 'races'… Our results show that when individuals are sampled homogeneously from around the globe, the pattern seen is one of gradients of allele frequencies that extend over the entire world, rather than discrete clusters. Therefore, there is no reason to assume that major genetic discontinuities exist between different continents or 'races'."

“At no point are there sharp gradients in the genetic continua across space”

Sure there are. They are called oceans. For example, in 1491 there was zero gene flow across the Atlantic Ocean, even at the merely 1600 mile wide gap between Senegal and Brazil.

There are even some sharp divisions on land, such as between the malarial lowlands of Nepal and the Himalayan heights. Sherpas look more like Koreans than like Hindus.

There's no sharp genetic discontinuity between native populations/tribes in Alaska and north-eastern Siberia; there was a former land-bridge that connected Siberia to Alaska and the Bering Strait today is crossed by island-hopping via the Diomede Islands, furthermore, the more south you go from Alaska (the genetic entry point) there is decreasing genetic similarity -as a gradient. If you look for example at the PCA in Tishkoff et al. 2009, there is a smooth genetic continua and native population/tribes from Alaska or northern Canada are not discontinuous from the Siberian or north-east Asian population samples.

Since there is a genetic continua, it is arbitrary how to slice or divide this, and large clustering at the continental level isn't useful, hence biologists and anthropologists decades ago could never agree how many races there were by ancestry (and those few scientists clinging to outdated racial ideas run into the same problem; the boundaries of the "Caucasoid"/"Mongoloid"/"Negroid" were always vague and heavily subjective; Carleton S. Coon (1962) classified India as "Caucasoid", but Stanley M. Garn (1961) disagreed; in his book Human Races, India is a separate geographical race.

And if you pay attention to population genetics, you should realise that over time scientists have been working with more and more local populations and moving away from broad classifications, hence the shift from race to demes (breeding populations) from the 1960s/70s. Former proponents of race like Joseph Birdsell abandoned race for local populations and clines. In years to come, there will be no need even for local populations as a unit of study, i.e. the advances in personal genomics and individual whole genome sequencing: "The conclusion is that “next-generation” genomic sequencing is advancing at a tremendous rate and that true personalized pharmacogenomics, based on individual genotyping, should soon become a clinical reality." - S.D.J. Pena. "The fallacy of racial pharmacogenomics". Brazilian Journal of Medical and Biological Research (2011) 44: 268-275

I observed somewhere that California has a unique arrangement of urban density and wilderness that makes it ideal for creepers. Lots of people moving in and out, lots of places to hide, maximum variety of environment in one state. Apparently they got the GSK using DNA from an ancestry service, a good reminder that you pay them to take and copyright what is yours, and possibly use it in the future to put you in prison.
I am loving the Ng story.>have name made of phonetic monosyllables
>police photographer still misspells it
>be wanted by the US Military
>for stealing full-auto weapons
>and promptly escaping a stockade to the Los Angeles underground
>be wanted by the State of California for kidnapping people and torturing them to death
>but, y'see, not all cans of salmon are the same
>this is the red stuff, not the cheap pink stuff, caught by a family business with a whimsically vintage logo, in small, dolphin-safe batches
>u n s a l t e d
>yeah, we're talking about a can of salmon, but it's a choice can of salmon, it's not like it was generic tuna here

Apparently they got the GSK using DNA from an ancestry service,

Yes, just read that, too:

Investigators used DNA from crime scenes that had been stored all these years and plugged the genetic profile of the suspected assailant into an online genealogy database. They found distant relatives of Mr. DeAngelo’s and, despite his years of eluding the authorities, traced their DNA to to his front door.

“We found a person that was the right age and lived in this area — and that was Mr. DeAngelo,” said Steve Grippi, the assistant chief in the Sacramento district attorney’s office.

Investigators then obtained what Anne Marie Schubert, the Sacramento district attorney, called “abandoned” DNA samples from Mr. DeAngelo. “You leave your DNA in a place that is a public domain,” she said.

I observed somewhere that California has a unique arrangement of urban density and wilderness that makes it ideal for creepers. Lots of people moving in and out, lots of places to hide, maximum variety of environment in one state.

It must be that the U.S. media has (un- or intentionally) mythologized and/or glamorized serial killers (i.e., Charles Manson, Hannibal Lecter, Dexter, etc.), because I see no other explanation and connection as to why the U.S. has more serial killers than the rest of the world combined, it looks like it to me. Plus the transient nature/culture of the U.S.:

"The majority of human population geneticists and biological anthropologists, though they reject the race concept because of the arbitrariness of racial divisions, are prepared to divide the entire human species into more-or-less discrete panmictic units or demes despite the extensive continuities in breeding patterns and allelic distributions that exist. Biological anthropologist Jonathan Marks, for example, rejects the “typological” division of humans into a small number of discrete races because, circling the globe, one finds that traits are distributing continuously. He argues instead that it is the “small biopackages” called populations, not races, that are the “real units of human diversity” (1995: 274, 116). Similarly, human population geneticist L. Luca Cavalli-Sforza treats panmictic populations as real but characterizes attempts to classify “clusters” of populations into races as a “futile exercise” (Cavalli-Sforza, Menozzi, and Piazza 1994, 19)." (Gannett, 2003)

As Bill Nye recently said: "There's different tribes but not different races". The tribes are local populations, and there are thousands of them, too many to count... Notice how the Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) contains 50+ population samples from across the globe; none of these populations are races in the sense of broad geographical aggregations (clusters) of populations, but local populations (i.e. ethnic groups) like Druze, Orcadians, Sardinians etc. Those are what population geneticists work with. Clustering Druze, Orcadians with Sardinians makes zero sense and Reich is mistaken. You can look up autosomal genetic distances (measured by Fst) between those populations and see they aren't particularly close; the only close genetic distances (under 0.1%) would be geographical neighbours, not populations living thousands of miles apart.

In Nei & Roychoudhury (1993), Cavilla-Sforza, et al. (1994) and Tian et al. (2009): the smallest genetic distance (under 0.1%) is between Germans and Danes (0.0009 Fst) whose geographical boundaries, are very close; however, if you then look at the extremities of Europe (southern versus northern), populations are more than 10 times genetically distant e.g. Greeks/Russians 1.1% (0.0108 Fst) and then if you compare a population from northern Europe to a population in middle-east, you find the genetic distance at over 2%. Genetic similarity is inversely correlated with geographic distance so populations are more genetically similar to others that are found nearby than distant. At no point are there sharp gradients in the genetic continua across space; what Reich is describing was refuted by Serre & Paabo (2004):

"Genetic variation in humans is sometimes described as being discontinuous among continents or among groups of individuals, and by some this has been interpreted as genetic support for 'races'… Our results show that when individuals are sampled homogeneously from around the globe, the pattern seen is one of gradients of allele frequencies that extend over the entire world, rather than discrete clusters. Therefore, there is no reason to assume that major genetic discontinuities exist between different continents or 'races'."

Our results show that when individuals are sampled homogeneously from around the globe, the pattern seen is one of gradients of allele frequencies that extend over the entire world, rather than discrete clusters. Therefore, there is no reason to assume that major genetic discontinuities exist between different continents or ‘races’.”

Really…

In case the visual is not compelling enough, be sure to note the relative % variance explained by PC1 and PC2 in panel B.

That's called a PRATT dude (point refuted a thousand times). The reason there are large gaps on that PCA is because of a computational artefact i.e. poor sampling of populations, not that those gaps reflect genetic reality. The study you posted has only 11 populations from Africa; in contrast Tishkoff et al. 2009 has over 100 population samples. Notice how the study you posted has no samples from northern Africa. Once you include enough populations and do not miss large geographical areas, any gaps disappear on PCA's and you see a smooth gradient/continua. There are no genetic clusters at the continental level; look at the PCA in Tishkoff.

"At no point are there sharp gradients in the genetic continua across space"

Sure there are. They are called oceans. For example, in 1491 there was zero gene flow across the Atlantic Ocean, even at the merely 1600 mile wide gap between Senegal and Brazil.

There are even some sharp divisions on land, such as between the malarial lowlands of Nepal and the Himalayan heights. Sherpas look more like Koreans than like Hindus.

There’s no sharp genetic discontinuity between native populations/tribes in Alaska and north-eastern Siberia; there was a former land-bridge that connected Siberia to Alaska and the Bering Strait today is crossed by island-hopping via the Diomede Islands, furthermore, the more south you go from Alaska (the genetic entry point) there is decreasing genetic similarity -as a gradient. If you look for example at the PCA in Tishkoff et al. 2009, there is a smooth genetic continua and native population/tribes from Alaska or northern Canada are not discontinuous from the Siberian or north-east Asian population samples.

Since there is a genetic continua, it is arbitrary how to slice or divide this, and large clustering at the continental level isn’t useful, hence biologists and anthropologists decades ago could never agree how many races there were by ancestry (and those few scientists clinging to outdated racial ideas run into the same problem; the boundaries of the “Caucasoid”/”Mongoloid”/”Negroid” were always vague and heavily subjective; Carleton S. Coon (1962) classified India as “Caucasoid”, but Stanley M. Garn (1961) disagreed; in his book Human Races, India is a separate geographical race.

And if you pay attention to population genetics, you should realise that over time scientists have been working with more and more local populations and moving away from broad classifications, hence the shift from race to demes (breeding populations) from the 1960s/70s. Former proponents of race like Joseph Birdsell abandoned race for local populations and clines. In years to come, there will be no need even for local populations as a unit of study, i.e. the advances in personal genomics and individual whole genome sequencing: “The conclusion is that “next-generation” genomic sequencing is advancing at a tremendous rate and that true personalized pharmacogenomics, based on individual genotyping, should soon become a clinical reality.” – S.D.J. Pena. “The fallacy of racial pharmacogenomics”. Brazilian Journal of Medical and Biological Research (2011) 44: 268-275

And if you pay attention to population genetics, you should realise that over time scientists have been working with more and more local populations and moving away from broad classifications, hence the shift from race to demes (breeding populations) from the 1960s/70s. Former proponents of race like Joseph Birdsell abandoned race for local populations and clines. In years to come, there will be no need even for local populations as a unit of study, i.e. the advances in personal genomics and individual whole genome sequencing: “The conclusion is that “next-generation” genomic sequencing is advancing at a tremendous rate and that true personalized pharmacogenomics, based on individual genotyping, should soon become a clinical reality.” – S.D.J. Pena. “The fallacy of racial pharmacogenomics”. Brazilian Journal of Medical and Biological Research (2011) 44: 268-275

This is fairly sensible. And thanks for the more complete reference. Steve's "splitters vs. lumpers" comment is apposite here, but let's talk a bit more about your reference.

One question, of course is what to do in the interim until the individual genotyping solution is available? Another question is how to come up with things like individualized reference ranges for lab test results? I am not sure if we will ever understand the genetic architecture of things like GFR well enough to calculate individual reference ranges, but race based versions are available now and work fairly well: http://jasn.asnjournals.org/content/18/9/2575.full
A mention of David Reich's prostate cancer work is also timely here: https://www.gnxp.com/WordPress/2018/04/18/the-genetic-risk-of-prostate-cancer-is-probably-higher-in-people-of-west-african-descent/

Now let's look at your reference in more detail rather than just quoting an abstract.
The fallacy of racial pharmacogenomicshttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21412662 (free full text there)

It is natural that a scientist from a highly admixed country like Brazil should be concerned about this. The racial approach to grouping for medicine does not work as well in such a population. It is kind of the author to be upfront with his biases:

Since there is consensus among anthropologists and human geneticists that, from a biological standpoint, human races do not exist (2), I believe that the word “race” should always be mentioned between quotation marks.
...
There is consensus among anthropologists and human
geneticists that, from a biological standpoint, human races
are not biological entities, but social constructs (2,5,6).

I think that is enough to dismiss this "scientist" as a serious person, but let's continue.

I tried, but there is so much fallacious (e.g. Lewontin's fallacy) ranting about how race does not exist. The Nazis even get a mention. And this is a research paper?!

That you provide that paper as a reference speaks volumes. I encourage anyone who is inclined to take that reference seriously to spend some time reading it.

Our results show that when individuals are sampled homogeneously from around the globe, the pattern seen is one of gradients of allele frequencies that extend over the entire world, rather than discrete clusters. Therefore, there is no reason to assume that major genetic discontinuities exist between different continents or ‘races’.”

In case the visual is not compelling enough, be sure to note the relative % variance explained by PC1 and PC2 in panel B.

http://www.unz.com/gnxp/which-population-is-most-genetically-distant-from-africans/ has nicely formatted comments.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/08/which-population-is-most-genetically-distant-from-africans has the graphic.

That’s called a PRATT dude (point refuted a thousand times). The reason there are large gaps on that PCA is because of a computational artefact i.e. poor sampling of populations, not that those gaps reflect genetic reality. The study you posted has only 11 populations from Africa; in contrast Tishkoff et al. 2009 has over 100 population samples. Notice how the study you posted has no samples from northern Africa. Once you include enough populations and do not miss large geographical areas, any gaps disappear on PCA’s and you see a smooth gradient/continua. There are no genetic clusters at the continental level; look at the PCA in Tishkoff.

Hey dude (you responding to an evidence based comment in such a way is a great clue you have nothing worthwhile to say, but I'll play along). More like a PTAATT (point talked around a thousand times).

It is interesting that you cite Tishkoff, 2009 as evidence. Let's examine that in more detail. It would have been nice if you had included a more complete reference or a link, but it is easy enough to do your work for you.

The Genetic Structure and History of Africans and African Americanshttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2947357/
Steve's take on that paper at the time: http://www.unz.com/isteve/african-american-admixture
Razib's take at the time: http://www.unz.com/gnxp/africans-americans-mostly-west-african-but-some-mostly-european/ (Ron, if you happen to read this, what is going on with images disappearing from the unz.com upload area?)

With admixture you will certainly see the gaps disappear. Millions of points in clusters with a few in the gaps between is not what I would call a "smooth gradient/continua" (note the latter word BTW, we will encounter a variant--continuum--below). Tishkoff disproportionately sampling highly admixed populations (e.g. African-Americans, Cape Mixed Ancestry) results in an emphasis on the in between points. It was hardly a random population sample of people in the world. She was explicitly looking at African-American admixture. In other words, the relative balance of groups and intermediate points in Tishkoff is a sampling artifact. The funny thing is that PC1 still accounts for about 20% of variance and we see a clear gap between Europe and Africa if we look at the base populations rather than the recent mixtures.

In particular, note how the additional PCs tend to subdivide ever finer groups.

How do you feel about other colors? Do red, orange, and yellow light exist? What are their precise frequency boundaries? Are there any gaps between them? Seems like a smooth continua to me.

How about black and white paint? If you mix them you get gray (any shade you want given the right mixture). Where are the exact boundaries between those colors? Seems like a smooth continua to me.

You might want to read up on the continuum fallacy: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Continuum_fallacy

The continuum fallacy (also known as the sorites fallacy or the fallacy of grey) is the fallacy of assuming that the existence of a continuum of possible states between two binary positions means that said positions are not meaningfully different. It is a form of equivocation: treating as equivalent two things that should not be treated as such.

P.S. This is what a refutation looks like. Not your pathetic hand waving. In particular notice the use of evidence (in detail, not a vague citation) and reasoning to detect both your fallacy of reasoning and the oversampling admixed groups issue.

There's no sharp genetic discontinuity between native populations/tribes in Alaska and north-eastern Siberia; there was a former land-bridge that connected Siberia to Alaska and the Bering Strait today is crossed by island-hopping via the Diomede Islands, furthermore, the more south you go from Alaska (the genetic entry point) there is decreasing genetic similarity -as a gradient. If you look for example at the PCA in Tishkoff et al. 2009, there is a smooth genetic continua and native population/tribes from Alaska or northern Canada are not discontinuous from the Siberian or north-east Asian population samples.

Since there is a genetic continua, it is arbitrary how to slice or divide this, and large clustering at the continental level isn't useful, hence biologists and anthropologists decades ago could never agree how many races there were by ancestry (and those few scientists clinging to outdated racial ideas run into the same problem; the boundaries of the "Caucasoid"/"Mongoloid"/"Negroid" were always vague and heavily subjective; Carleton S. Coon (1962) classified India as "Caucasoid", but Stanley M. Garn (1961) disagreed; in his book Human Races, India is a separate geographical race.

And if you pay attention to population genetics, you should realise that over time scientists have been working with more and more local populations and moving away from broad classifications, hence the shift from race to demes (breeding populations) from the 1960s/70s. Former proponents of race like Joseph Birdsell abandoned race for local populations and clines. In years to come, there will be no need even for local populations as a unit of study, i.e. the advances in personal genomics and individual whole genome sequencing: "The conclusion is that “next-generation” genomic sequencing is advancing at a tremendous rate and that true personalized pharmacogenomics, based on individual genotyping, should soon become a clinical reality." - S.D.J. Pena. "The fallacy of racial pharmacogenomics". Brazilian Journal of Medical and Biological Research (2011) 44: 268-275

It’s almost as if race is like every other topic in which there are splitters and lumpers.

That's called a PRATT dude (point refuted a thousand times). The reason there are large gaps on that PCA is because of a computational artefact i.e. poor sampling of populations, not that those gaps reflect genetic reality. The study you posted has only 11 populations from Africa; in contrast Tishkoff et al. 2009 has over 100 population samples. Notice how the study you posted has no samples from northern Africa. Once you include enough populations and do not miss large geographical areas, any gaps disappear on PCA's and you see a smooth gradient/continua. There are no genetic clusters at the continental level; look at the PCA in Tishkoff.

Hey dude (you responding to an evidence based comment in such a way is a great clue you have nothing worthwhile to say, but I’ll play along). More like a PTAATT (point talked around a thousand times).

It is interesting that you cite Tishkoff, 2009 as evidence. Let’s examine that in more detail. It would have been nice if you had included a more complete reference or a link, but it is easy enough to do your work for you.

With admixture you will certainly see the gaps disappear. Millions of points in clusters with a few in the gaps between is not what I would call a “smooth gradient/continua” (note the latter word BTW, we will encounter a variant–continuum–below). Tishkoff disproportionately sampling highly admixed populations (e.g. African-Americans, Cape Mixed Ancestry) results in an emphasis on the in between points. It was hardly a random population sample of people in the world. She was explicitly looking at African-American admixture. In other words, the relative balance of groups and intermediate points in Tishkoff is a sampling artifact. The funny thing is that PC1 still accounts for about 20% of variance and we see a clear gap between Europe and Africa if we look at the base populations rather than the recent mixtures.

The continuum fallacy (also known as the sorites fallacy or the fallacy of grey) is the fallacy of assuming that the existence of a continuum of possible states between two binary positions means that said positions are not meaningfully different. It is a form of equivocation: treating as equivalent two things that should not be treated as such.

P.S. This is what a refutation looks like. Not your pathetic hand waving. In particular notice the use of evidence (in detail, not a vague citation) and reasoning to detect both your fallacy of reasoning and the oversampling admixed groups issue.

Self-identified "African-Americans" are irrelevant to the genetic continua in that PCA. Tishkoff used more than 100 population samples from across Africa, including populations from regions that are usually not included. You've completely ignored this and made up nonsense about "oversampling admixed groups" which is not the case.

There is no continuum fallacy considering races are *meant* to be discontinuous, silly billy. The problem is 'race realists' re-define race and have moved away from the traditional race concept (why? because race was refuted and instead of being honest about this they have to try to cling onto the belief and re-define the word); on this subject read any of Adam Hochman's papers who warns: "The problem with weak versions of racial naturalism is that they do not contrast with anti-realism about biological race. When race naturalists weaken their position they end up agreeing with their opponents about human biology, and defending a trivialised definition of race." (Hochman, 2014 "Unnaturalised racial naturalism")

And since you linked to RW, read the article that shows why racialism is pseudo-science:

There's no sharp genetic discontinuity between native populations/tribes in Alaska and north-eastern Siberia; there was a former land-bridge that connected Siberia to Alaska and the Bering Strait today is crossed by island-hopping via the Diomede Islands, furthermore, the more south you go from Alaska (the genetic entry point) there is decreasing genetic similarity -as a gradient. If you look for example at the PCA in Tishkoff et al. 2009, there is a smooth genetic continua and native population/tribes from Alaska or northern Canada are not discontinuous from the Siberian or north-east Asian population samples.

Since there is a genetic continua, it is arbitrary how to slice or divide this, and large clustering at the continental level isn't useful, hence biologists and anthropologists decades ago could never agree how many races there were by ancestry (and those few scientists clinging to outdated racial ideas run into the same problem; the boundaries of the "Caucasoid"/"Mongoloid"/"Negroid" were always vague and heavily subjective; Carleton S. Coon (1962) classified India as "Caucasoid", but Stanley M. Garn (1961) disagreed; in his book Human Races, India is a separate geographical race.

And if you pay attention to population genetics, you should realise that over time scientists have been working with more and more local populations and moving away from broad classifications, hence the shift from race to demes (breeding populations) from the 1960s/70s. Former proponents of race like Joseph Birdsell abandoned race for local populations and clines. In years to come, there will be no need even for local populations as a unit of study, i.e. the advances in personal genomics and individual whole genome sequencing: "The conclusion is that “next-generation” genomic sequencing is advancing at a tremendous rate and that true personalized pharmacogenomics, based on individual genotyping, should soon become a clinical reality." - S.D.J. Pena. "The fallacy of racial pharmacogenomics". Brazilian Journal of Medical and Biological Research (2011) 44: 268-275

And if you pay attention to population genetics, you should realise that over time scientists have been working with more and more local populations and moving away from broad classifications, hence the shift from race to demes (breeding populations) from the 1960s/70s. Former proponents of race like Joseph Birdsell abandoned race for local populations and clines. In years to come, there will be no need even for local populations as a unit of study, i.e. the advances in personal genomics and individual whole genome sequencing: “The conclusion is that “next-generation” genomic sequencing is advancing at a tremendous rate and that true personalized pharmacogenomics, based on individual genotyping, should soon become a clinical reality.” – S.D.J. Pena. “The fallacy of racial pharmacogenomics”. Brazilian Journal of Medical and Biological Research (2011) 44: 268-275

This is fairly sensible. And thanks for the more complete reference. Steve’s “splitters vs. lumpers” comment is apposite here, but let’s talk a bit more about your reference.

It is natural that a scientist from a highly admixed country like Brazil should be concerned about this. The racial approach to grouping for medicine does not work as well in such a population. It is kind of the author to be upfront with his biases:

Since there is consensus among anthropologists and human geneticists that, from a biological standpoint, human races do not exist (2), I believe that the word “race” should always be mentioned between quotation marks.
…
There is consensus among anthropologists and human
geneticists that, from a biological standpoint, human races
are not biological entities, but social constructs (2,5,6).

I think that is enough to dismiss this “scientist” as a serious person, but let’s continue.

I tried, but there is so much fallacious (e.g. Lewontin’s fallacy) ranting about how race does not exist. The Nazis even get a mention. And this is a research paper?!

That you provide that paper as a reference speaks volumes. I encourage anyone who is inclined to take that reference seriously to spend some time reading it.

Hey dude (you responding to an evidence based comment in such a way is a great clue you have nothing worthwhile to say, but I'll play along). More like a PTAATT (point talked around a thousand times).

It is interesting that you cite Tishkoff, 2009 as evidence. Let's examine that in more detail. It would have been nice if you had included a more complete reference or a link, but it is easy enough to do your work for you.

The Genetic Structure and History of Africans and African Americanshttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2947357/
Steve's take on that paper at the time: http://www.unz.com/isteve/african-american-admixture
Razib's take at the time: http://www.unz.com/gnxp/africans-americans-mostly-west-african-but-some-mostly-european/ (Ron, if you happen to read this, what is going on with images disappearing from the unz.com upload area?)

With admixture you will certainly see the gaps disappear. Millions of points in clusters with a few in the gaps between is not what I would call a "smooth gradient/continua" (note the latter word BTW, we will encounter a variant--continuum--below). Tishkoff disproportionately sampling highly admixed populations (e.g. African-Americans, Cape Mixed Ancestry) results in an emphasis on the in between points. It was hardly a random population sample of people in the world. She was explicitly looking at African-American admixture. In other words, the relative balance of groups and intermediate points in Tishkoff is a sampling artifact. The funny thing is that PC1 still accounts for about 20% of variance and we see a clear gap between Europe and Africa if we look at the base populations rather than the recent mixtures.

In particular, note how the additional PCs tend to subdivide ever finer groups.

How do you feel about other colors? Do red, orange, and yellow light exist? What are their precise frequency boundaries? Are there any gaps between them? Seems like a smooth continua to me.

How about black and white paint? If you mix them you get gray (any shade you want given the right mixture). Where are the exact boundaries between those colors? Seems like a smooth continua to me.

You might want to read up on the continuum fallacy: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Continuum_fallacy

The continuum fallacy (also known as the sorites fallacy or the fallacy of grey) is the fallacy of assuming that the existence of a continuum of possible states between two binary positions means that said positions are not meaningfully different. It is a form of equivocation: treating as equivalent two things that should not be treated as such.

P.S. This is what a refutation looks like. Not your pathetic hand waving. In particular notice the use of evidence (in detail, not a vague citation) and reasoning to detect both your fallacy of reasoning and the oversampling admixed groups issue.

Self-identified “African-Americans” are irrelevant to the genetic continua in that PCA. Tishkoff used more than 100 population samples from across Africa, including populations from regions that are usually not included. You’ve completely ignored this and made up nonsense about “oversampling admixed groups” which is not the case.

There is no continuum fallacy considering races are *meant* to be discontinuous, silly billy. The problem is ‘race realists’ re-define race and have moved away from the traditional race concept (why? because race was refuted and instead of being honest about this they have to try to cling onto the belief and re-define the word); on this subject read any of Adam Hochman’s papers who warns: “The problem with weak versions of racial naturalism is that they do not contrast with anti-realism about biological race. When race naturalists weaken their position they end up agreeing with their opponents about human biology, and defending a trivialised definition of race.” (Hochman, 2014 “Unnaturalised racial naturalism”)

And since you linked to RW, read the article that shows why racialism is pseudo-science:

I'm curious, do you think comments like "silly billy" make you seem like a serious person? I don't. I think it is clear you are not worth engaging with further.

I encourage anyone who is inclined to take Oliver D. Smith's points in this thread seriously to take a look at the references I gave above. I think I have responded to the few concrete statements he made adequately.

"There is no continuum fallacy considering races are *meant* to be discontinuous, silly billy. The problem is ‘race realists’ re-define race and have moved away from the traditional race concept"

Consider Wallace (1864), in “The origin of human races and the antiquity of man deduced from the theory of natural selection”, on polygenism versus monogenism:

"In favour of the unity of mankind it is argued that there are no races without transitions to others; that every race exhibits within itself variations of colour, of hair, of feature, and of form, to such a degree as to bridge over to a large extent the gap that separates it from other races. It is asserted that no race is homogeneous; that there is a tendency to vary; that climate, food, and habits produce and render permanent physical peculiarities, which, though slight in the limited periods allowed to our observation, would, in the long ages during which the human race has existed, have sufficed to produce all the differences that now appear …The advocates of the original diversity of man, on the other hand, have much to say for themselves. They argue that proofs of change in man have never been brought forward except to the most trifling amount, while evidence of his permanence meets us everywhere.”

So, those many who argued that human races [lineages] were varieties of a species commonly pointed out that these lineages blended into one another and thus probably did not constitute species-lineages. But what about the few who argued for the original multiplicity of human races [lineages]? Turning to "Types of Manking", recognized as the most rigorous defense of the polygenist position, we see terms clearly defined and position outlined in chapter II. We are told:

"The meaning attached to the term species in natural history, is very definite and intelligible. It includes only the following conditions: namely, separate origins, and distinction of race, evinced by a constant transmission of some characterizing peculiarity of organization. A race of animals or of plants marked by any particular character which it has constantly displayed, is termed a ‘species’; and two races are considered specifically difference, if they are distinguishable from each other by some characteristic which the one cannot be supposed to have acquired, or the other have lost, through any known operations of physical causes for we are hence led to conclude, that tribes thus distinguished have not descended from the same original stock."

“It will be seen by a comparison of our definitions that we recognize no substantial difference between the term type and species – permanence of characteristic belonging equally to both.”

According to the authors, species are independent creations, not descended from one another; species status is diagnosed by the presence of constant character, also referred to as: typical character. Species are races “not descended from the same original stock”, and not all “races” [lineages] are species.

But what about species and types? Were these understood to be necessarily discontinuous? When discussing modern classifications, we are told:

"Though many other classifications might be added, the above suffice to testify how arbitrary all classifications inevitably must be; because no reason has yet been assigned why, if two original pairs of human beings be admitted, we should not accept an indefinite number; and, if we are to view mankind as governed by the same laws that regulate the rest of the animal kingdom, this conclusion is the most natural, not less than apparently most in accordance with the general plan of the Creator."

Put simply: by nature there is a nature continuum of proximate species out of which classifications of groups are arbitrarily delineated.

"Insomuch as these types [species] are more or less fertile inter se, and as they have, for the last 5000 years, been subjected to successions of wars, migrations, captivities, intermixtures, etc. it would be a vain task at the present day to attempt the unraveling of the tangled thread, and to make anything like a just classification of types; or to determine how many were primitive, or which one of them has arisen from admixture of types. This difficulty holds not alone with regards to mankind, but also with respect to dogs, horse, cattle, sheep, and other domesticated animals, as we will take occasion to show. All the ethnography can now hope to accomplish is, to selection some of the more prominent types, or rather groups of proximate types, compare them with each other, and demonstrate that they are, and have always been distinct. "

Put simply: in the case of humans, wars, migrations, racial admixture have blurred this natural continuum, mixing present day species/types up. Parallel problems occurs with domestic animals and so it is impossible to identify the original species.

So where is the supposed historical understanding of race which entailed discontinuity? Species were only considered characteristically discontinuous by monogenists, who emphasized the continuity of human racial variation to provide empirical evidence that human races were constant varieties, not species. And polygenists explicitly denied that discontinuity (and inter-sterility) were diagnostic characteristics of species (let alone races in general, which include lineages which were not specifically distinct).

Now in contrast to what racialists were said to have said but did not, well cited, popular race deniers have in facts claimed, race does not exist or is not meaningful because: (1) descent is not useful in understanding human variation, (2) it is impossible to create descent based classifications owing to discordance in traits. Both of which are obviously false.

Self-identified "African-Americans" are irrelevant to the genetic continua in that PCA. Tishkoff used more than 100 population samples from across Africa, including populations from regions that are usually not included. You've completely ignored this and made up nonsense about "oversampling admixed groups" which is not the case.

There is no continuum fallacy considering races are *meant* to be discontinuous, silly billy. The problem is 'race realists' re-define race and have moved away from the traditional race concept (why? because race was refuted and instead of being honest about this they have to try to cling onto the belief and re-define the word); on this subject read any of Adam Hochman's papers who warns: "The problem with weak versions of racial naturalism is that they do not contrast with anti-realism about biological race. When race naturalists weaken their position they end up agreeing with their opponents about human biology, and defending a trivialised definition of race." (Hochman, 2014 "Unnaturalised racial naturalism")

And since you linked to RW, read the article that shows why racialism is pseudo-science:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Racialism

I’m curious, do you think comments like “silly billy” make you seem like a serious person? I don’t. I think it is clear you are not worth engaging with further.

I encourage anyone who is inclined to take Oliver D. Smith’s points in this thread seriously to take a look at the references I gave above. I think I have responded to the few concrete statements he made adequately.

Because you cannot recover from what I posted. I refuted you. There's no genetic discontinuity between continents. Look up isolation-by-distance and learn something about genetics. IBD is incompatible with racialism.

Self-identified "African-Americans" are irrelevant to the genetic continua in that PCA. Tishkoff used more than 100 population samples from across Africa, including populations from regions that are usually not included. You've completely ignored this and made up nonsense about "oversampling admixed groups" which is not the case.

There is no continuum fallacy considering races are *meant* to be discontinuous, silly billy. The problem is 'race realists' re-define race and have moved away from the traditional race concept (why? because race was refuted and instead of being honest about this they have to try to cling onto the belief and re-define the word); on this subject read any of Adam Hochman's papers who warns: "The problem with weak versions of racial naturalism is that they do not contrast with anti-realism about biological race. When race naturalists weaken their position they end up agreeing with their opponents about human biology, and defending a trivialised definition of race." (Hochman, 2014 "Unnaturalised racial naturalism")

And since you linked to RW, read the article that shows why racialism is pseudo-science:

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Racialism

“There is no continuum fallacy considering races are *meant* to be discontinuous, silly billy. The problem is ‘race realists’ re-define race and have moved away from the traditional race concept”

Consider Wallace (1864), in “The origin of human races and the antiquity of man deduced from the theory of natural selection”, on polygenism versus monogenism:

“In favour of the unity of mankind it is argued that there are no races without transitions to others; that every race exhibits within itself variations of colour, of hair, of feature, and of form, to such a degree as to bridge over to a large extent the gap that separates it from other races. It is asserted that no race is homogeneous; that there is a tendency to vary; that climate, food, and habits produce and render permanent physical peculiarities, which, though slight in the limited periods allowed to our observation, would, in the long ages during which the human race has existed, have sufficed to produce all the differences that now appear …The advocates of the original diversity of man, on the other hand, have much to say for themselves. They argue that proofs of change in man have never been brought forward except to the most trifling amount, while evidence of his permanence meets us everywhere.”

So, those many who argued that human races [lineages] were varieties of a species commonly pointed out that these lineages blended into one another and thus probably did not constitute species-lineages. But what about the few who argued for the original multiplicity of human races [lineages]? Turning to “Types of Manking”, recognized as the most rigorous defense of the polygenist position, we see terms clearly defined and position outlined in chapter II. We are told:

“The meaning attached to the term species in natural history, is very definite and intelligible. It includes only the following conditions: namely, separate origins, and distinction of race, evinced by a constant transmission of some characterizing peculiarity of organization. A race of animals or of plants marked by any particular character which it has constantly displayed, is termed a ‘species’; and two races are considered specifically difference, if they are distinguishable from each other by some characteristic which the one cannot be supposed to have acquired, or the other have lost, through any known operations of physical causes for we are hence led to conclude, that tribes thus distinguished have not descended from the same original stock.”

“It will be seen by a comparison of our definitions that we recognize no substantial difference between the term type and species – permanence of characteristic belonging equally to both.”

According to the authors, species are independent creations, not descended from one another; species status is diagnosed by the presence of constant character, also referred to as: typical character. Species are races “not descended from the same original stock”, and not all “races” [lineages] are species.

But what about species and types? Were these understood to be necessarily discontinuous? When discussing modern classifications, we are told:

“Though many other classifications might be added, the above suffice to testify how arbitrary all classifications inevitably must be; because no reason has yet been assigned why, if two original pairs of human beings be admitted, we should not accept an indefinite number; and, if we are to view mankind as governed by the same laws that regulate the rest of the animal kingdom, this conclusion is the most natural, not less than apparently most in accordance with the general plan of the Creator.”

Put simply: by nature there is a nature continuum of proximate species out of which classifications of groups are arbitrarily delineated.

“Insomuch as these types [species] are more or less fertile inter se, and as they have, for the last 5000 years, been subjected to successions of wars, migrations, captivities, intermixtures, etc. it would be a vain task at the present day to attempt the unraveling of the tangled thread, and to make anything like a just classification of types; or to determine how many were primitive, or which one of them has arisen from admixture of types. This difficulty holds not alone with regards to mankind, but also with respect to dogs, horse, cattle, sheep, and other domesticated animals, as we will take occasion to show. All the ethnography can now hope to accomplish is, to selection some of the more prominent types, or rather groups of proximate types, compare them with each other, and demonstrate that they are, and have always been distinct. ”

Put simply: in the case of humans, wars, migrations, racial admixture have blurred this natural continuum, mixing present day species/types up. Parallel problems occurs with domestic animals and so it is impossible to identify the original species.

So where is the supposed historical understanding of race which entailed discontinuity? Species were only considered characteristically discontinuous by monogenists, who emphasized the continuity of human racial variation to provide empirical evidence that human races were constant varieties, not species. And polygenists explicitly denied that discontinuity (and inter-sterility) were diagnostic characteristics of species (let alone races in general, which include lineages which were not specifically distinct).

Now in contrast to what racialists were said to have said but did not, well cited, popular race deniers have in facts claimed, race does not exist or is not meaningful because: (1) descent is not useful in understanding human variation, (2) it is impossible to create descent based classifications owing to discordance in traits. Both of which are obviously false.

There are very meaningful, historically sensible senses in which "races are real". For example, Frank Livingstone, frequently cited by race deniers (PBS, AAA, anthropologists such as the smedleys, marks, wolfpoff, brace, templeton, sussman, raff, etc.) literally argued that "there are no races" because:
1. Character discordance makes delineation of ancestry groups impossible:

"If one genetic character is used, it is possible to divide a species into subspecies according to the variation in this character. If two characters are used, it may still be possible, but there will be some “problem populations,” which, if you are an anthropologist, will be labelled composite or mixed. As the number of characters increases it becomes more nearly impossible to determine what the “actual races really are."

"In this way race or common ancestry and migration have been used to explain much of the genetic variability among human populations. Unfortunately such explanations neither accord with our knowledge of the population structure and movements of hunters and gatherers, nor take into consideration the basic cause of biological variation, natural selection. "

3. Members of so called racial groups are not in fact similar in the said ways on account of common ancestry.

"To apply a concept of the Linnean system to a group of populations implies something about the evolutionary history of these populations, and it also implies that these populations are similar in whatever characters were used to classify them together because of close common ancestry. It is this implied explanation of whatever genetic variability is used to group populations into races which I consider to be false."

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

But fine, if you are willing to concede that humans races are real in ways they were frequently said to not be by opponents, we will concede that they are not real in some ways they were rarely if ever said to be by actual proponents.

Ernst Mayr in the 1950s tried to re-define subspecies (geographical races) so they could be continuous (clinal) and sympatric with overlapping ranges. He was criticized by the vast majority of zoologists and taxonomists at the time who restricted the term subspecies to allopatric populations that don't overlap and are genetically discontinuous because of no gene flow e.g. Edwards (1954, 1956), Van Son (1955), Pimental (1958, 1959) etc. What's interesting is Mayr seems to have realised his mistake in his later career and in one publication used the standard restricted definition:

"O’Brien & Mayr (1991) recommended that the subspecies concept be limited to geographical subunits or allopatric populations of extant species that are ‘reproductively isolated’ by a physical barrier under the framework of the biological species concept. They suggested the following criteria be used for recognition of subspecies: (1) allopatry with a unique geographical range (or habitat); (2) phylogenetically concordant phenotypic characters; (3) genetically divergent as a result of an absence of gene flow; and (4) a unique natural history relative to other subdivisions of the species." (Braby et al. 2012)

"There is no continuum fallacy considering races are *meant* to be discontinuous, silly billy. The problem is ‘race realists’ re-define race and have moved away from the traditional race concept"

Consider Wallace (1864), in “The origin of human races and the antiquity of man deduced from the theory of natural selection”, on polygenism versus monogenism:

"In favour of the unity of mankind it is argued that there are no races without transitions to others; that every race exhibits within itself variations of colour, of hair, of feature, and of form, to such a degree as to bridge over to a large extent the gap that separates it from other races. It is asserted that no race is homogeneous; that there is a tendency to vary; that climate, food, and habits produce and render permanent physical peculiarities, which, though slight in the limited periods allowed to our observation, would, in the long ages during which the human race has existed, have sufficed to produce all the differences that now appear …The advocates of the original diversity of man, on the other hand, have much to say for themselves. They argue that proofs of change in man have never been brought forward except to the most trifling amount, while evidence of his permanence meets us everywhere.”

So, those many who argued that human races [lineages] were varieties of a species commonly pointed out that these lineages blended into one another and thus probably did not constitute species-lineages. But what about the few who argued for the original multiplicity of human races [lineages]? Turning to "Types of Manking", recognized as the most rigorous defense of the polygenist position, we see terms clearly defined and position outlined in chapter II. We are told:

"The meaning attached to the term species in natural history, is very definite and intelligible. It includes only the following conditions: namely, separate origins, and distinction of race, evinced by a constant transmission of some characterizing peculiarity of organization. A race of animals or of plants marked by any particular character which it has constantly displayed, is termed a ‘species’; and two races are considered specifically difference, if they are distinguishable from each other by some characteristic which the one cannot be supposed to have acquired, or the other have lost, through any known operations of physical causes for we are hence led to conclude, that tribes thus distinguished have not descended from the same original stock."

“It will be seen by a comparison of our definitions that we recognize no substantial difference between the term type and species – permanence of characteristic belonging equally to both.”

According to the authors, species are independent creations, not descended from one another; species status is diagnosed by the presence of constant character, also referred to as: typical character. Species are races “not descended from the same original stock”, and not all “races” [lineages] are species.

But what about species and types? Were these understood to be necessarily discontinuous? When discussing modern classifications, we are told:

"Though many other classifications might be added, the above suffice to testify how arbitrary all classifications inevitably must be; because no reason has yet been assigned why, if two original pairs of human beings be admitted, we should not accept an indefinite number; and, if we are to view mankind as governed by the same laws that regulate the rest of the animal kingdom, this conclusion is the most natural, not less than apparently most in accordance with the general plan of the Creator."

Put simply: by nature there is a nature continuum of proximate species out of which classifications of groups are arbitrarily delineated.

"Insomuch as these types [species] are more or less fertile inter se, and as they have, for the last 5000 years, been subjected to successions of wars, migrations, captivities, intermixtures, etc. it would be a vain task at the present day to attempt the unraveling of the tangled thread, and to make anything like a just classification of types; or to determine how many were primitive, or which one of them has arisen from admixture of types. This difficulty holds not alone with regards to mankind, but also with respect to dogs, horse, cattle, sheep, and other domesticated animals, as we will take occasion to show. All the ethnography can now hope to accomplish is, to selection some of the more prominent types, or rather groups of proximate types, compare them with each other, and demonstrate that they are, and have always been distinct. "

Put simply: in the case of humans, wars, migrations, racial admixture have blurred this natural continuum, mixing present day species/types up. Parallel problems occurs with domestic animals and so it is impossible to identify the original species.

So where is the supposed historical understanding of race which entailed discontinuity? Species were only considered characteristically discontinuous by monogenists, who emphasized the continuity of human racial variation to provide empirical evidence that human races were constant varieties, not species. And polygenists explicitly denied that discontinuity (and inter-sterility) were diagnostic characteristics of species (let alone races in general, which include lineages which were not specifically distinct).

Now in contrast to what racialists were said to have said but did not, well cited, popular race deniers have in facts claimed, race does not exist or is not meaningful because: (1) descent is not useful in understanding human variation, (2) it is impossible to create descent based classifications owing to discordance in traits. Both of which are obviously false.

There are very meaningful, historically sensible senses in which “races are real”. For example, Frank Livingstone, frequently cited by race deniers (PBS, AAA, anthropologists such as the smedleys, marks, wolfpoff, brace, templeton, sussman, raff, etc.) literally argued that “there are no races” because:
1. Character discordance makes delineation of ancestry groups impossible:

“If one genetic character is used, it is possible to divide a species into subspecies according to the variation in this character. If two characters are used, it may still be possible, but there will be some “problem populations,” which, if you are an anthropologist, will be labelled composite or mixed. As the number of characters increases it becomes more nearly impossible to determine what the “actual races really are.”

“In this way race or common ancestry and migration have been used to explain much of the genetic variability among human populations. Unfortunately such explanations neither accord with our knowledge of the population structure and movements of hunters and gatherers, nor take into consideration the basic cause of biological variation, natural selection. ”

3. Members of so called racial groups are not in fact similar in the said ways on account of common ancestry.

“To apply a concept of the Linnean system to a group of populations implies something about the evolutionary history of these populations, and it also implies that these populations are similar in whatever characters were used to classify them together because of close common ancestry. It is this implied explanation of whatever genetic variability is used to group populations into races which I consider to be false.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

But fine, if you are willing to concede that humans races are real in ways they were frequently said to not be by opponents, we will concede that they are not real in some ways they were rarely if ever said to be by actual proponents.

Yep, Wallace (1864) and Blumenbach, but it's dishonest to cherry pick those and ignore 99.9% of anthropologists at the time who were saying the opposite. And you don't appear to know what you're talking about with polygenism. The polygenists argued for separate evolutionary lineages, virtual absence of gene flow, and geographical isolation for races: Gates, Keith, Hooton, Coon etc.

“Well, race as a 18th to early 20th century project to understand biological variation in terms of descent (and modification) made a lot of sense. And a good deal of past research has been recapitulated by modern genetic research. For many reasons, including the needs of genetic epidemiology, understanding the effect of descent is important today. However, the term “race” is confusing. This is for a number of reasons, including social usage, recent admixture, historic semantic ambiguities, and word games played in some quarters as an attempt delegitimize research and discourse on human genetic variation. Given the confusion, we suggest using “ancestry population” in technical literature when describing both major and minor descent groups. Of course, “ancestry populations” will often correspond with groupings once called races, both referring to descent groups. Using less ambiguous terms, we think, will help research move forward.”

It will be interesting to see the argument if/when e.g., East Asian “ancestral populations” are established beyond reasonable doubt to be congenitally predisposed to higher ability, etc. than e.g., many African and European “ancestral populations”. I would guess:

“Well, of course, we never argued, otherwise. The racialists are just redefining what they meant. What they really meant was that all “negroids” were inferior to all “mongoloids” which, of course, we know was shown to be false by mid-20th century anthropologists, like the great [ ... ]. But now the racialists are dishonestly trying to repackage their pseudoscience by talking about “risk scores” “mean differences” and “ancestral populations”, which isn’t want they originally meant.”
Along with:
“Well, we see that research has disproven the White racialists racial supremacists idea that the “Europid” or “European race” is congenitally superior to all other ancestral populations — not that the pseudoscientific racialists will ever accept their inferiority.”

These people. Does it matter, though? I am not sure that it does that much.

I'm curious, do you think comments like "silly billy" make you seem like a serious person? I don't. I think it is clear you are not worth engaging with further.

I encourage anyone who is inclined to take Oliver D. Smith's points in this thread seriously to take a look at the references I gave above. I think I have responded to the few concrete statements he made adequately.

Because you cannot recover from what I posted. I refuted you. There’s no genetic discontinuity between continents. Look up isolation-by-distance and learn something about genetics. IBD is incompatible with racialism.

"There is no continuum fallacy considering races are *meant* to be discontinuous, silly billy. The problem is ‘race realists’ re-define race and have moved away from the traditional race concept"

Consider Wallace (1864), in “The origin of human races and the antiquity of man deduced from the theory of natural selection”, on polygenism versus monogenism:

"In favour of the unity of mankind it is argued that there are no races without transitions to others; that every race exhibits within itself variations of colour, of hair, of feature, and of form, to such a degree as to bridge over to a large extent the gap that separates it from other races. It is asserted that no race is homogeneous; that there is a tendency to vary; that climate, food, and habits produce and render permanent physical peculiarities, which, though slight in the limited periods allowed to our observation, would, in the long ages during which the human race has existed, have sufficed to produce all the differences that now appear …The advocates of the original diversity of man, on the other hand, have much to say for themselves. They argue that proofs of change in man have never been brought forward except to the most trifling amount, while evidence of his permanence meets us everywhere.”

So, those many who argued that human races [lineages] were varieties of a species commonly pointed out that these lineages blended into one another and thus probably did not constitute species-lineages. But what about the few who argued for the original multiplicity of human races [lineages]? Turning to "Types of Manking", recognized as the most rigorous defense of the polygenist position, we see terms clearly defined and position outlined in chapter II. We are told:

"The meaning attached to the term species in natural history, is very definite and intelligible. It includes only the following conditions: namely, separate origins, and distinction of race, evinced by a constant transmission of some characterizing peculiarity of organization. A race of animals or of plants marked by any particular character which it has constantly displayed, is termed a ‘species’; and two races are considered specifically difference, if they are distinguishable from each other by some characteristic which the one cannot be supposed to have acquired, or the other have lost, through any known operations of physical causes for we are hence led to conclude, that tribes thus distinguished have not descended from the same original stock."

“It will be seen by a comparison of our definitions that we recognize no substantial difference between the term type and species – permanence of characteristic belonging equally to both.”

According to the authors, species are independent creations, not descended from one another; species status is diagnosed by the presence of constant character, also referred to as: typical character. Species are races “not descended from the same original stock”, and not all “races” [lineages] are species.

But what about species and types? Were these understood to be necessarily discontinuous? When discussing modern classifications, we are told:

"Though many other classifications might be added, the above suffice to testify how arbitrary all classifications inevitably must be; because no reason has yet been assigned why, if two original pairs of human beings be admitted, we should not accept an indefinite number; and, if we are to view mankind as governed by the same laws that regulate the rest of the animal kingdom, this conclusion is the most natural, not less than apparently most in accordance with the general plan of the Creator."

Put simply: by nature there is a nature continuum of proximate species out of which classifications of groups are arbitrarily delineated.

"Insomuch as these types [species] are more or less fertile inter se, and as they have, for the last 5000 years, been subjected to successions of wars, migrations, captivities, intermixtures, etc. it would be a vain task at the present day to attempt the unraveling of the tangled thread, and to make anything like a just classification of types; or to determine how many were primitive, or which one of them has arisen from admixture of types. This difficulty holds not alone with regards to mankind, but also with respect to dogs, horse, cattle, sheep, and other domesticated animals, as we will take occasion to show. All the ethnography can now hope to accomplish is, to selection some of the more prominent types, or rather groups of proximate types, compare them with each other, and demonstrate that they are, and have always been distinct. "

Put simply: in the case of humans, wars, migrations, racial admixture have blurred this natural continuum, mixing present day species/types up. Parallel problems occurs with domestic animals and so it is impossible to identify the original species.

So where is the supposed historical understanding of race which entailed discontinuity? Species were only considered characteristically discontinuous by monogenists, who emphasized the continuity of human racial variation to provide empirical evidence that human races were constant varieties, not species. And polygenists explicitly denied that discontinuity (and inter-sterility) were diagnostic characteristics of species (let alone races in general, which include lineages which were not specifically distinct).

Now in contrast to what racialists were said to have said but did not, well cited, popular race deniers have in facts claimed, race does not exist or is not meaningful because: (1) descent is not useful in understanding human variation, (2) it is impossible to create descent based classifications owing to discordance in traits. Both of which are obviously false.

Ernst Mayr in the 1950s tried to re-define subspecies (geographical races) so they could be continuous (clinal) and sympatric with overlapping ranges. He was criticized by the vast majority of zoologists and taxonomists at the time who restricted the term subspecies to allopatric populations that don’t overlap and are genetically discontinuous because of no gene flow e.g. Edwards (1954, 1956), Van Son (1955), Pimental (1958, 1959) etc. What’s interesting is Mayr seems to have realised his mistake in his later career and in one publication used the standard restricted definition:

“O’Brien & Mayr (1991) recommended that the subspecies concept be limited to geographical subunits or allopatric populations of extant species that are ‘reproductively isolated’ by a physical barrier under the framework of the biological species concept. They suggested the following criteria be used for recognition of subspecies: (1) allopatry with a unique geographical range (or habitat); (2) phylogenetically concordant phenotypic characters; (3) genetically divergent as a result of an absence of gene flow; and (4) a unique natural history relative to other subdivisions of the species.” (Braby et al. 2012)

There are very meaningful, historically sensible senses in which "races are real". For example, Frank Livingstone, frequently cited by race deniers (PBS, AAA, anthropologists such as the smedleys, marks, wolfpoff, brace, templeton, sussman, raff, etc.) literally argued that "there are no races" because:
1. Character discordance makes delineation of ancestry groups impossible:

"If one genetic character is used, it is possible to divide a species into subspecies according to the variation in this character. If two characters are used, it may still be possible, but there will be some “problem populations,” which, if you are an anthropologist, will be labelled composite or mixed. As the number of characters increases it becomes more nearly impossible to determine what the “actual races really are."

"In this way race or common ancestry and migration have been used to explain much of the genetic variability among human populations. Unfortunately such explanations neither accord with our knowledge of the population structure and movements of hunters and gatherers, nor take into consideration the basic cause of biological variation, natural selection. "

3. Members of so called racial groups are not in fact similar in the said ways on account of common ancestry.

"To apply a concept of the Linnean system to a group of populations implies something about the evolutionary history of these populations, and it also implies that these populations are similar in whatever characters were used to classify them together because of close common ancestry. It is this implied explanation of whatever genetic variability is used to group populations into races which I consider to be false."

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

But fine, if you are willing to concede that humans races are real in ways they were frequently said to not be by opponents, we will concede that they are not real in some ways they were rarely if ever said to be by actual proponents.

Yep, Wallace (1864) and Blumenbach, but it’s dishonest to cherry pick those and ignore 99.9% of anthropologists at the time who were saying the opposite. And you don’t appear to know what you’re talking about with polygenism. The polygenists argued for separate evolutionary lineages, virtual absence of gene flow, and geographical isolation for races: Gates, Keith, Hooton, Coon etc.

Investigators used DNA from crime scenes that had been stored all these years and plugged the genetic profile of the suspected assailant into an online genealogy database. They found distant relatives of Mr. DeAngelo’s and, despite his years of eluding the authorities, traced their DNA to to his front door.

“We found a person that was the right age and lived in this area — and that was Mr. DeAngelo,” said Steve Grippi, the assistant chief in the Sacramento district attorney’s office.

Investigators then obtained what Anne Marie Schubert, the Sacramento district attorney, called “abandoned” DNA samples from Mr. DeAngelo. “You leave your DNA in a place that is a public domain,” she said.

- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/26/us/golden-state-killer.html

I observed somewhere that California has a unique arrangement of urban density and wilderness that makes it ideal for creepers. Lots of people moving in and out, lots of places to hide, maximum variety of environment in one state.

It must be that the U.S. media has (un- or intentionally) mythologized and/or glamorized serial killers (i.e., Charles Manson, Hannibal Lecter, Dexter, etc.), because I see no other explanation and connection as to why the U.S. has more serial killers than the rest of the world combined, it looks like it to me. Plus the transient nature/culture of the U.S.:

The U.S. had 20x more serial killers than the next most country, England.